Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
This work addresses the challenge of localizing objects with only image-level labels, which is important for reducing annotation costs in computer vision, but it is incremental as it builds on existing foreground prediction map methods.
The paper tackles the problem of weakly supervised object localization by proposing a Background Activation Suppression method that uses activation values instead of cross-entropy to guide learning, achieving significant and consistent improvements on CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve localization task. Existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy (CE) to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of generator. We argue for using activation value to achieve more efficient learning. It is based on the experimental observation that, for a trained network, CE converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. While activation value increases until the mask expands to the object boundary, which indicates that more object areas can be learned by using activation value. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint module (AMC) is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using the foreground region guidance and the area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS.